Stasi Meets Steve Jobs

Published by Eric Margolis       Common Dreams             October 27, 2013

“Gentlemen do not read other gentlemen’s mail” sniffed US Secretary of State Henry Stimson in 1929 when told that American cryptographers had broken Japan’s naval and diplomatic codes. Alas, there are not any old-school gentlemen left in Washington these days. Revelations of US electronic spying by whistleblower Edward Snowden have ignited a furor across Latin America and now Europe.

This week’s uproar was intensified by claims that the US National Security Agency (NSA) had tapped into the cell phone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Europe’s most important and influential leader. Further outrage erupted in France after reports that its leaders and diplomats had been tapped by NSA’s big ears.

Back in the day, French Interior Ministers – notably Nicholas Sarkozy – used to stay up late poring over wire taps of fellow officials’ peccadillos. That was good fun. Today, by contrast, the NSA and CIA are sweeping up all communications of supposed allies as part of the runaway US national security state. Call it the Stasi meets Apple’s late Steve Jobs.

Last month alone, NSA reportedly sifted through 70 million French phone calls, text and email under the lame pretext of fighting terrorism. What NSA was really finding were the phone numbers of prominent Frenchmen’s mistresses or boyfriends – very useful for CIA blackmail ops – and important commercial information. Terrorism is a red herring. NSA’s run amok spying, allegedly to combat “terrorism,” is making a lot of Americans wonder again about the events of 9/11 that triggered the explosion of America’s spy state, restrictive laws, and foreign wars.

America’s mammoth, ever-growing spy state built by President George W. Bush costs over $80 billion per annum. Some 4.8 million Americans now have secret security clearance and work for the octopod national security state.

US Elint (electronic spying) has humiliated European and Latin leaders and made them and NATO look like American vassals to be dismissed or disdained. How can Europe’s leaders face their own voters after this shameful episode? Revelations by Snowdon and Army private Bradley Manning show that Washington treats its NATO allies in the same imperious manner the old Soviet Union bossed around the Warsaw Pact.

Europe’s leaders are under mounting pressure to demonstrate their independence of Uncle Sam by taking some stern retaliatory action against US interests.   starting point would be building a brand-new electronic communications architecture for Western Europe that resists US penetration, and creating a truly independent Europe military capability. Time for Europe to stop being foot soldiers to America’s nuclear knights.

US reputation in Europe and Latin America is now at an all-time low. The next NSA spying scandals will likely come from the Mideast, India and Pakistan, Canada, South Korea and Japan. Obama may be remembered as having gotten the world even angrier at the US than predecessor George W. Bush – quite an accomplishment.

Washington claims “everyone does spying.” True enough, but no one is anywhere close to NSA’s giant vacuum cleaner and all-hearing bugs. What the US has been doing is far more than information gathering against a handful of anti-American militants. It’s heavy-duty intimidation. A reminder that Big Brother is watching and listening.  The deeply corrupt US Congress won’t do much to curtail NSA’s information theft. Too many of its members profit from market trades made on the basis of NSA snooping.          [Abridged]     http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/10/27-2

© 2013 Eric S. Margolis

The European Drone War

by Chris Cole       Common  Dreams        Oct. 26, 2013

While there is rightly much media attention on the US drone war in Pakistan and Yemen, there is a very different but over-looked “drone war” taking place in Europe right now. In parliamentary committee rooms, in company boardrooms, and in packed public meetings, arguments rage about whether Europe should embrace or reject the use of armed drones.

Many European armed forces already have unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as drones, in their armories for reconnaissance, intelligence and surveillance purposes. Increasingly, however, European countries are under pressure to follow in the footsteps of the US and embrace the use of armed drones.

The UK has been a long-time partner with the US in using armed drones, with British military forces using US Predator drones in Iraq starting in 2004 before acquiring their own Reaper drones for use in Afghanistan in 2007. Since then, the UK has launched more than 400 missiles and bombs from its drones in Afghanistan and this is likely to increase as the UK doubles its armed drone fleet over the next year while also now directly operating drones from UK as well as US soil.

So far no other European country has used armed drones. French forces have used unarmed Harfang drones (based on Israel’s Heron) in Afghanistan, Libya and Mali; German forces in Afghanistan have been using unarmed Luna and Israeli Heron drones, and Italy has been operating unarmed drones alongside the US in Libya and Afghanistan from a joint Italian-US ground control station at Amendola airbase in southeast Italy.  But despite widespread public opposition, growing pressure from the pro-drone lobby and military companies is pushing European countries to acquire armed drone capability.

Across Europe, the acquisition of armed drones is highly controversial. Many political parties are divided on the issue - or flatly oppose it - and there is much public hostility. A Pew Research Poll conducted in 2012 showed widespread opposition to drone strikes, including 59% of people in Germany, 63% in France, 76% in Spain, 55% in Italy, and a whopping 90% in Greece. Only the UK did not have a majority of its public against the use of armed drones but even so, only 44% were in favor.  In the US, opposition to the drone wars is focused on the use of drones for targeted killing. In Europe however, the focus is much more on whether the so-called “risk free” nature of drone warfare - at least to your own forces - will simply lead to more armed conflict, as well as an expansion of targeted killing and a lowering of global security in general.

. Behind the scenes, the drone lobby is trying to persuade European governments to ignore the public anxiety and commit to armed unmanned systems. Their strategically placed Op-Eds extol the economic virtue of developing armed drones and of not being “left behind”. At the same time, NATO and European Union officials are urging European countries to increase spending on drones. US military companies are actively trying to amend international treaties in order to export armed drone technology to Europe. And senior arms company executives are directly lobbying European governments to commit to developing and building a future European armed drone. Already European military companies are devoting much effort and resources towards future combat drones.

As US and European combat forces withdraw from Afghanistan over the next 12 months , the war over drones in Europe is likely to get more intense. The drone lobby will try to clinch deals citing that a war-weary public is unlikely to support putting “‘boots on the ground”’ anytime soon and will therefore support remotely controlled warfare. Skeptics will be demanding more transparency and information about exactly how drones have been used in Afghanistan - including proper casualty data - in order to assess the professed “pin point” accuracy of armed drone strikes and make informed decisions about future use.               [Abridged]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/10/26

How the Sunni-Shia Schism is Dividing the World

by Robert Fisk                               Independent/UK                       October 24, 2013

The Muslim world’s historic – and deeply tragic – chasm between Sunni and Shia Islam is having worldwide repercussions. Syria’s civil war, America’s craven alliance with the Sunni Gulf autocracies, and Sunni (as well as Israeli) suspicions of Shia Iran are affecting even the work of the United Nations.  Saudi Arabia’s petulant refusal last week to take its place among non-voting members of the Security Council, an unprecedented step by any UN member, was intended to express the dictatorial monarchy’s displeasure with Washington’s refusal to bomb Syria after the use of chemical weapons in Damascus – but it also represented Saudi fears that Barack Obama might respond to Iranian overtures for better relations with the West.

Hatred of the Shia/Alawite Syrian regime, an unquenchable suspicion of Shia Iran’s nuclear plans and a general fear of Shia expansion is turning the unelected Sunni Arab monarchies into proxy allies of the Israeli state they have often sworn to destroy. Furthermore, America’s latest contribution to Middle East “peace” could be the sale of $10.8bn worth of missiles and arms to Sunni Saudi Arabia and the equally Sunni United Arab Emirates, including GBU-39 bombs – the weapons cutely called “bunker-busters” – which they could use against Shia Iran. Israel, of course, possesses the very same armaments.

On Monday Kerry said that he valued the autocracy’s leadership in the region, shared Riyadh’s desire to de-nuclearise Iran and to bring an end to the Syrian war.  But Kerry’s insistence that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his regime must abandon power means that a Sunni government would take over Syria; and his wish to disarm Shia Iran – however notional its nuclear threat may be – would ensure that Sunni military power would dominate the Middle East from the Afghan border to the Mediterranean.

The minority Sunni monarchy in Bahrain – supported by the Saudis and of course by the compliant governments of the US, Britain, et al – is likewise accusing Shia Iran of colluding with the island’s majority Shias. Oddly, Prince Bandar, in his comments, claimed that Barack Obama had failed to support Saudi policy in Bahrain – which involved sending its own troops into the island to help repress Shia demonstrators in 2011 – when in fact America’s silence over the regime’s paramilitary violence was the nearest Washington could go in offering its backing to the Sunni minority and his Royal Highness the King of Bahrain.

All in all, then, a mighty Western love affair with Sunni Islam – a love that very definitely cannot speak its name in an Arab Gulf world in which “democracy”, “moderation”, “partnership” and outright dictatorship are interchangeable – which neither Washington nor London nor Paris (nor indeed Moscow or Beijing) will acknowledge. But, needless to say, there are a few irritating – and incongruous – ripples in this mutual passion.

The Saudis, for example, blame Obama for allowing Egypt’s decadent Hosni Mubarak to be overthrown. They blame the Americans for supporting the elected Muslim Brother Mohamed Morsi as president – elections not being terribly popular in the Gulf – and the Saudis are now throwing cash at Egypt’s new military regime. Assad in Damascus also offered his congratulations to the Egyptian military. Was the Egyptian army not, after all – like Assad himself – trying to prevent religious extremists from taking power?  Fair enough – providing we remember that the Saudis are really supporting the Egyptian Salafists who cynically gave their loyalty to the Egyptian military, and that Saudi-financed Salafists are among the fiercest opponents of Assad.

Thankfully for Kerry and his European mates, the absence of any institutional memory in the State Department, Foreign Office or Quai d’Orsay means that no one need remember that 15 of the 19 mass-killers of 9/11 were also Salafists and – let us above all, please God, forget this – were all Sunni citizens of Saudi Arabia.   

© 2013 The Independent           [Abridged]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/10/24-2

Drone Warfare: America is still killing civilians from the sky

Our Amnesty Report released today reveals the extent of unlawful killings

Kate  Allen                          Independent/UK                     22 October 2013

In a major new report published today, the most comprehensive study of the US drones programme conducted from a human rights perspective, Amnesty has reviewed the use of drones in Pakistan’s north-western tribal areas where most drone strikes have taken place. The report condemns the almost complete absence of transparency around the US drone programme and concludes that the USA has carried out unlawful killings, some of which could amount to war crimes.  Amnesty reviewed all 45 known drone strikes that took place in North Waziristan in north-western Pakistan between January 2012 and August this year. Contrary to official claims that those killed were “terrorists”, Amnesty’s research indicates that in a number of cases the victims were not involved in armed activity and posed no threat to life.

Cases like that of Mamana Bibi, a 68-year-old grandmother who, last October, was picking vegetables in the family field outside her home, with her grandchildren. No men of “fighting age” were anywhere near her. She was horrifically killed in a double strike, apparently by a Hellfire missile. A second volley of missiles was fired a few minutes later, gravely injuring some of the children who ran to the place where their grandmother had been. It is hard to know how a grandmother and her grandchildren could have posed an imminent threat to life.  Hard to imagine also, how anyone could claim that in the immediate aftermath of an initial strike, a pilot thousands of miles away could determine who the people who ran to the scene of the incident were, and whether they were legitimate targets. In this instance, they were children who were maimed. These so called “rescuer attacks” are a grim signature feature of the drone attacks documented in the report.

The USA continues to rely on a “global war” doctrine to attempt to justify a borderless war with al-Qa’ida, the Taliban or other “enemies” of the USA. It also claims that its drone strikes are extremely accurate based on vetted intelligence and that the vast majority of those killed have been linked to al-Qa’ida and its allies. The world has to take this on faith, since the US administration refuses to disclose key facts, such as details of who is targeted and on what basis. Certainly the findings of Amnesty’s research today put a significant dent in that faith.

The first rule about the drones programme is, apparently, that you don’t talk about the drones programme. Although that rule has not been universally adhered to, almost every element of the operation is surrounded in a veil of secrecy. The USA’s promise to increase transparency around drone strikes, underscored by a major policy speech by President Barack Obama in May, has yet to become a reality and the USA still refuses to divulge even basic factual and legal information.  This secrecy has enabled the USA to act with impunity and block victims from receiving justice or compensation. As far as Amnesty is aware, no US official has ever been held to account for unlawful killings by drones in Pakistan. The secrecy surrounding the drones programme essentially gives the US administration a license to kill beyond the reach of the courts or basic standards of international law.

The use of drones is rapidly becoming one of the big moral challenges of our time, and if we are not careful, their use will continue under the radar, and beyond the scope of public scrutiny. There are debates to be had about how technological advances are deployed and there needs to be accountability without exceptions. For now, we are dealing in the dark, without access to the quantitative data that experts need access to and reliant on compiling testimony from bereaved families like the Bibis who lost a wife, mother and grandmother when she was blown to bits from a pilotless aircraft in the skies. How common is that tale of woe? The truth is at the moment we really don’t know. It’s time for the US to drone up.         [Abridged]

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/drone-warfare-obama-promised-transparency

12 Years a Slave tells an American story

Jasmin Alibhai Brown                        Independent/UK                20 October 2013

But when will Britain confront its own history?

Turner Prize-winning artist Steve McQueen is now one of Britain’s most independent, unsettling film-makers, an outsider whose cameras go looking into the Stygian nooks of the human psyche and secreted collective perversions. His new film, 12 Years a Slave, examines both. It is based on a true tale of a free black man, Solomon Northup, living quietly near New York in 1841, when he was duped, captured and taken off to a southern plantation.

Critics seem shaken by its unsparing detail and authenticity.  McQueen, known as “an English film-maker” is a Londoner of Grenadian descent: “I’m here because my family went through slavery. Fact.” That fact and others have been buried away in unknown graves in the country which now claims him and in the other UK nations too.

Our national narrative goes like this: slavery occurred in America and the untamed Caribbean isles, with the co-operation of the “dark continent” and it took heroic Britons to end the evil. Lies told so often and so assiduously eventually transmute into impenetrable, solid veracities. This film will not shift those steadfast beliefs because the story is well, again, an American one. When will we get such a film made about, say, one of the small boys sold in a London coffee house, his life as a slave on these shores, his attempts to escape, the terrible punishments, mutilations and degradation? It happened, even after Lord Mansfield decreed in 1772, that no men or women could be sent forth from these isles to be slaves.

Oh the arguments I have had with people, including friends, about Britain’s slave history. They do not want to know. Last summer we went on holiday to Trinidad and Tobago. In museums, seeing shackles, testimonies, torture instruments, etchings of whippings and hangings, my daughter wept. Although she has been educated in Britain, she was never taught about what really went on, the grotesque truths.

To calm those readers who will be getting very angry, I must acknowledge some facts, which do, up to a point, mitigate the culpability of this nation. Arabs and Africans had been enslavers for many centuries and continued after abolition. Long before the British came into the business, the Spanish, Dutch, French and Portuguese were catching and transporting Africans across the Atlantic and selling them. Britain then transformed the trade into a massive, profitable industry. The country, however, had vocal women and men of conscience who, with ex-slaves, finally stopped the commodification of humans. It was a moral crusade. Ships patrolled the coasts of Africa to stop slave ships. It is right that we always remember what they did. But we must also remember the horrors of enslavement that created revulsion among those great and good, women and Quakers in particular.

Sir John Hawkins, second cousin of Sir Francis Drake, started it all in 1555, with a cargo of 301 slaves. After the Restoration, the trade was controlled by monopoly companies backed by the King. Jamaica was seized by the British in 1655. Fifty years later, there were 42,000 slaves there. Half a century after that the number rose to 200,000. Death rates were high so many more must have landed. Read the books by James Walvin to get the stark details. Almost every institution and class in this country profited. The Tate Gallery, Oxbridge colleges, the Church, politicians, the aristocracy, middle classes, banks, manufacturers and traders. In the recent past, to their credit, cities like Bristol and Liverpool have broken the silence and found ways to permanently remember the stolen people.

It’s not enough but at least England tries. Scotland, in contrast, has completely excised its part and the whitewash continues. It joined the Union so it could get into the lucrative game. Glasgow was built on slave money and later the empire. Many great lairds owned massive Caribbean slave plantations. Robert Burns planned to go out to the Caribbean to become a slave driver. The vast number of Scottish surnames of black people in the US, Caribbean and UK show just how deeply involved the Scots were in this enterprise.

African-American writers and artists will not let their nation forget. Here the descendants of slaves remain reticent. Some even feel shame and don’t want to be reminded of those dark centuries. Though we have compelling black writers, thus far none has given us the potent slave narratives of, say, Alex Haley or Toni Morrison. McQueen sees the consequences of the trade in black-skinned men, women and children: “Look at the prison population, mental health issues, poverty.” Actual enslavement still goes on too –  trafficked farm workers, young, forced prostitutes, undocumented domestics and cleaners.

This groundbreaking film, whilst very important, will not get audiences to make connections between America and Britain, then and now. And so British slavery remains the greatest story never told.        [Abbrev.]

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/12-years-a-slave-tells-an-american-story-but-when-will-britai

In the Middle East, the prize of peace is now there for the taking

By  Hans Christof von Sponeck, Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann and Denis J Halliday

Guardian/UK                        17 October 2013

In February 1972, US president Richard Nixon made a "surprise" visit to China, recognising Mao Zedong's communist regime and opening the door to the more or less peaceful relations that have prevailed ever since between the two countries. Although Nixon had built his political career on the anticommunist campaigns that were in part a reaction to the "loss of China" in 1949, he was then following in the footsteps of General Charles de Gaulle, who had established diplomatic relations with China eight years earlier, in 1964..

In 1973 Nixon and Henry Kissinger signed the Paris accords that put an official end to the US war in Vietnam. A decade before that, John F Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev resolved the Cuban missile crisis by, on the Soviet side, withdrawing missiles from Cuba, and, on the US side, by promising not to attack Cuba and withdrawing missiles from Turkey.

These events changed the course of history away from endless confrontation and the risk of global war. It must be remembered that neither China nor the Soviet Union nor North Vietnam met western standards of democracy, less so in fact than present-day Iran. De Gaulle, Kennedy, Nixon and Kissinger were no friends of communism and, on the other side, neither Khrushchev, Mao nor the Vietnamese had any use for capitalism and western imperialism.

Peace is not something to be made between friends but between adversaries. It is based on a recognition of reality. When countries or ideologies are in conflict, there are only two issues: total destruction of one side, as with Rome and Carthage, or peace and negotiations. As history shows, in the case of the Soviet Union, China and Vietnam, peace was a precondition that made the internal evolution of those countries possible.

During recent decades, when it comes to the Middle East, the west has forgotten the very notion of diplomacy. Instead, it has followed the line of "total destruction of the enemy", whether Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, the Assad regime in Syria or the Islamic Republic of Iran. That line has been based on ideology: a mixture of human rights fundamentalism and blind support for the "only democracy in the region", Israel. However, it has led to a total failure: this policy has brought no benefit whatsoever to the west and has only caused immense suffering to the populations that it claimed to be helping.

There are signs that the situation is changing. The British and then the American people and their representatives rejected a new war in Syria. Russia, the US and Syria reached an agreement over Syria's chemical weapons. US president Barack Obama is making moves towards honest negotiations with Iran, and the EU's foreign policy chief and Iran's foreign minister judged talks just concluded in Geneva as "substantive and forward-looking".

All these developments should be pursued with the utmost energy. The planned second Geneva conference on Syria must include all internal and external parties to the conflict if it is to constitute an important step towards finding a solution to the tragedy of that war-torn country. The unjust sanctions against Iran, as in the earlier case of Iraq, are severely punishing the population and must be lifted as soon as possible.

Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his supporters are staunchly opposed to these moves towards peace. But they must realise that we might start asking questions about the biggest elephant in the room: Israel's weapons of mass destruction. Why should that country, alone in the region, possess such weapons? If its security is sacrosanct, what about the security of the Palestinians, or of the Lebanese? And why should the US continue to bankroll a country that superbly ignores all its requests, such as stopping settlements in the Occupied Territories?

Countries are inhabited by people possessing common humanity, with the right to live, regardless of ideology. Ideology divides. Our real interests presuppose peaceful relations between different social systems and mutual respect of national sovereignty. Our interests, well understood, coincide with those of the rest of mankind. [Abbrev.]

Hans Christof von Sponeck was UN assistant secretary general and United Nations humanitarian co-ordinator for Iraq from 1998-2000.  Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann was president of the UN general assembly between 2008 and 2009 and foreign minister of Nicaragua from 1979 to 1990.  Denis J Halliday was UN assistant secretary general from 1994-98       http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/17/middle-east-prize-peace

Race is central to the fear and angst of the US right

Gary Younge                            Guardian/UK                                    17 October 2013

Just as the House of Representatives was finally voting to reopen the government and save the nation from reneging on debt and inviting a downgrade, a House stenographer appears to have suffered a breakdown. Grabbing the microphone, she started defending God's honour before the nation. He will not be mocked. The greatest deception here is this is not one nation under God. It never was. The constitution would not have been written by freemasons. They go against God. You cannot serve two masters. After being removed and questioned, she was taken away for psychiatric evaluation.

Her mental health is no laughing matter. But the description of her interjection by much of the media as a "bizarre" interruption to the House vote deserves interrogation.  Because everything about this was bizarre. From the moment Ted Cruz got up and started quoting Ashton Kutcher and talking about Star Wars into the wee hours, this entire process has been nothing but bizarre.  America, once again, took the familiar road from the height of dysfunction to the brink of default – until reality grabbed it by the scruff of the neck and slapped it straight, before it did itself and others grave harm.

Because America is powerful, the world has to take notice of these self-inflicted crises. But because it has become so predictably dysfunctional and routinely reckless, they are difficult to take seriously or, at times, even fathom. To the rest of the world and much of America, this is yet another dangerous folly. The fact that the nation did not default should come as cold comfort. The fact that we are even talking about it defaulting is a problem.

This particular flirtation with fate was driven by a visceral opposition to the moderate provision of something most western nations take for granted: health care. The reforms they opposed had been passed by the very body of which they are a member and had been been approved by the US supreme court, the guardian of the very constitution they claimed to be defending. For this, they started a fight they never had the numbers to win and carried on waging it long after it was clear they had lost.

"We're not going to be disrespected," insisted Republican Indiana Congressman Marlin Stutzman, last week. "We have to get something out of this. And I don't know what that even is."  Nor did anyone else. That's why the Republicans went down to humiliating defeat. As South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham admitted:

“We took some bread crumbs and left an entire meal on the table. This has been a really bad two weeks for the Republican party.”

But to couch this episode only as a Democratic victory would really miss the point. For the process by which such a shutdown and breakdown could happen is not just the work of a few cranky Tea Party types. It is rooted in an electoral system that is heavily gerrymandered, where only those who can pay, can play. The reason the Republican dissenters could proceed with such unstrategic zeal is because they are in safe, rigged seats and so risk no challenge at the polls.

Indeed, given that they only have to fear nomination within their own party, rather than election by the nation at large, there is an incentive to act out in this way because it appeals to the base. When constituencies are so heavily contorted in the interests of incumbents that there is precious little consequence to anything a politician does, then you don't really have a democracy, you just have the vote. This temporary resolution buys them time, but it does not buy them any real solution – since there is absolutely nothing to prevent a repeat performance. Which is what it is: a performance. As said Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid put it on Wednesday night: “I'm tired. Concluding this crisis is historic. But let's be honest: this was pain inflicted on the nation for no good reason. We cannot … we cannot, cannot make the same mistakes again.”

Unfortunately, they can. Almost certainly, they will.     

.http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/17/america-skewed-democracy-debt-ceiling-shutdown

And so America's skewed democracy lurches on toward its next crisis

Gary Younge                            Guardian/UK                                    17 October 2013

Just as the House of Representatives was finally voting to reopen the government and save the nation from reneging on debt and inviting a downgrade, a House stenographer appears to have suffered a breakdown. Grabbing the microphone, she started defending God's honour before the nation. He will not be mocked. The greatest deception here is this is not one nation under God. It never was. The constitution would not have been written by freemasons. They go against God. You cannot serve two masters. After being removed and questioned, she was taken away for psychiatric evaluation.

Her mental health is no laughing matter. But the description of her interjection by much of the media as a "bizarre" interruption to the House vote deserves interrogation.  Because everything about this was bizarre. From the moment Ted Cruz got up and started quoting Ashton Kutcher and talking about Star Wars into the wee hours, this entire process has been nothing but bizarre.  America, once again, took the familiar road from the height of dysfunction to the brink of default – until reality grabbed it by the scruff of the neck and slapped it straight, before it did itself and others grave harm.

Because America is powerful, the world has to take notice of these self-inflicted crises. But because it has become so predictably dysfunctional and routinely reckless, they are difficult to take seriously or, at times, even fathom. To the rest of the world and much of America, this is yet another dangerous folly. The fact that the nation did not default should come as cold comfort. The fact that we are even talking about it defaulting is a problem.

This particular flirtation with fate was driven by a visceral opposition to the moderate provision of something most western nations take for granted: health care. The reforms they opposed had been passed by the very body of which they are a member and had been been approved by the US supreme court, the guardian of the very constitution they claimed to be defending. For this, they started a fight they never had the numbers to win and carried on waging it long after it was clear they had lost.

"We're not going to be disrespected," insisted Republican Indiana Congressman Marlin Stutzman, last week. "We have to get something out of this. And I don't know what that even is."  Nor did anyone else. That's why the Republicans went down to humiliating defeat. As South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham admitted:

“We took some bread crumbs and left an entire meal on the table. This has been a really bad two weeks for the Republican party.”

But to couch this episode only as a Democratic victory would really miss the point. For the process by which such a shutdown and breakdown could happen is not just the work of a few cranky Tea Party types. It is rooted in an electoral system that is heavily gerrymandered, where only those who can pay, can play. The reason the Republican dissenters could proceed with such unstrategic zeal is because they are in safe, rigged seats and so risk no challenge at the polls.

Indeed, given that they only have to fear nomination within their own party, rather than election by the nation at large, there is an incentive to act out in this way because it appeals to the base. When constituencies are so heavily contorted in the interests of incumbents that there is precious little consequence to anything a politician does, then you don't really have a democracy, you just have the vote. This temporary resolution buys them time, but it does not buy them any real solution – since there is absolutely nothing to prevent a repeat performance. Which is what it is: a performance. As said Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid put it on Wednesday night: “I'm tired. Concluding this crisis is historic. But let's be honest: this was pain inflicted on the nation for no good reason. We cannot … we cannot, cannot make the same mistakes again.”

Unfortunately, they can. Almost certainly, they will.     

.http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/17/america-skewed-democracy-debt-ceiling-shutdown

US cowardice will let Israel’s isolated right off the hook

Robert  Fisk                 Independent/UK                       01 OCTOBER 2013

These are hard times for the Israeli right. Used to bullying the US – and especially its present, shallow leader – the Likudists suddenly find that the whole world wants peace in the Middle East rather than war. Brits and Americans didn’t want to go to war in Syria. Now, with the pleasant smile of President Rouhani gracing their television screens, fully accepting the facts of the Jewish Holocaust – unlike his deranged and infantile predecessor – the Americans (75 per cent, if we are to believe the polls) don’t want to go to war with Iran either.

Having, live on television, forced President Obama to grovel to him on his last trip to the White House – Benjamin Netanyahu brusquely told him to forget UN Security Resolution 242, which calls for a withdrawal of Israeli forces from lands occupied after the 1967 war – the Israeli Prime Minister did a little grovelling himself on Monday. He no longer called for a total end to all Iranian nuclear activities. Now it was only Iran’s “military nuclear programme” which must be shut down. And, of course, like Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction programme” which President George W Bush had to invent when the weapons themselves turned out to be an invention, we still don’t know if Mr Netanyahu’s version of Iran’s “military nuclear programme” actually exists.

What we do know is that when Mr Rouhani started saying all the things we had been demanding that Iran should say for years, Israel went bananas. Mr Netanyahu condemned him before he had even said a word. “A wolf in sheep’s clothing.” Even when Mr Rouhani spoke of peace and an end to nuclear suspicions, Israel’s “Strategic Affairs” Minister, said time had run out for future negotiations. Yuval Steinitz claimed that “if the Iranians continue to run [their nuclear programme], in another half a year they will have bomb capability”.

Mr Netanyahu’s own office joined in the smear campaign. “One must not be fooled by the Iranian President’s fraudulent words,” one of Mr Netanyahu’s men sneered. “The Iranians are spinning in the media so that the centrifuges can keep on spinning.”  The Rouhani speech was “a honey trap”. Mr Netanyahu himself said Mr Rouhani’s address to the UN, a speech of immense importance after 34 years of total divorce between Iran and the US, was “cynical” and “totally hypocritical”.  Israel Hayom, the Likudist freesheet, dredged up the old pre-Second World War appeasement argument that the Israeli right have been reheating for well over 30 years. Perhaps it had its effect. If he was not so frightened of Israel – as most US administrations are – President Obama might actually have shaken hands with Mr Rouhani last week; though Mr Rouhani himself might have preferred not to touch the hand of the “Great Satan” too soon. Instead, President Obama settled for a miserable phone call.

When Mr Rouhani came to speak, Western nations crowded into the chamber to hear him. But Israel stormed out. “A stupid gesture,” according to that wise old Israeli sage, writer and philosopher Uri Avnery. “. Stupid because it painted Israel as a spoiler, at a time when the entire world is seized by an attack of optimism after the recent events in Damascus and Tehran. Stupid, because it proclaims the fact that Israel is at present totally isolated.”

Mr Avnery’s contention is Israel wanted two wars, the first against Syria, the second against Iran. As he wrote last week, when Congress hesitated to strike Damascus, “the hounds of hell were let loose. Aipac (the largest Likudist pro-Israeli lobby group in the US) sent its parliamentary rottweillers to Capitol Hill to tear to pieces any senator or congressman who objected”. Yet at the White House on Monday, the Israeli Prime Minister had calmed down. I doubt if it will last. Israel, I suspect, will do everything it can to cut down Mr Rouhani’s overtures.

For there was President Obama at Monday’s meeting, praising Mr Netanyahu for his support for a two-state solution. There is, of course, only a “limited amount of time” to achieve this illusory goal because the Netanyahu government is thieving, against all international law, yet more Palestinian Arab land for Jews and Jews only, at a faster rate than ever, to prevent just such a Palestinian state ever existing. And when President Obama can’t even explain this weird “limited amount of time”, the Israelis know that he is still a groveller. This is what real “appeasement” is all about. Fear.  And you can be sure that Madame Clinton – to quote Sir Thomas More – doesn’t have the spittle for it. For she wants to be the next appeaser-president.  The Likudists have isolated Israel from the world just now but be sure American cowardice will let them off the hook.    [Abbrev.] 

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/us-cowardice-will-let-israels-isolated-right-off-the-hook

Yachting Winds

by Ian Harris          Otago Daily Times           Oct. 11, 2013

The slow-drawn agony of the battle for the America’s Cup last month got me thinking about that quixotic ingredient central to the spectacle: the wind.  It blew wherever (and whenever) it pleased. Some days there was too much of it, some days too little, or it blew from the wrong quarter. Throw in the vagaries of time, tide and the Hundred Commandments governing this billionaire-driven spectacle, and you have the perfect recipe for frustration and disappointment – not only for crews, but also for countless Kiwi enthusiasts repeatedly thwarted in their desire to see a triumphant New Zealand team notch its ninth win over Team USA on Oracle and bring the Auld Mug home.

Early on we (that is the men on the water and myriad Kiwis following them on television half a world away) were in the ascendant, awaiting only the coup de grace. The decisive win loomed, we were close to ecstatic – and the race was ruled out because light airs prevented Aotearoa from finishing the race within the time limit.

That quirk of the wind allowed Oracle to surge back, suddenly superior in technology, speed and tactics, and swamp the luckless Kiwis. We were all gutted. Such is Kiwi solidarity, and long may it last.

But that uncontrollable wind is worth a second look. It figures prominently in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, pointing to something even more profound in human experience than the America’s Cup.  In the Hebrew Bible wind is ruach, a word meaning air in motion, something felt, something unseen, coming now from this quarter, now from that, sometimes fierce, sometimes gentle, always unpindownable – as on San Francisco Bay.

That made ruach the perfect symbol for a presence which people felt but could never master. They discerned it variously as a presence in nature, or in the close company of others, or in times of solitary reflection. Whichever, they had a sense that they were tapping into something much bigger than themselves, but also something real and ultimate.

A yachtie’s wind is part of nature, and in some contexts ruach means that and no more. But as an invisible, moving force, it was open to metaphorical expansion. So the biblical writers extended ruach imaginatively to mean the breath that gives life – even the breath that brought forth Earth and life upon it.  Accordingly, the Bible is only two verses old when in the mythic story of creation ruach comes into play as “the wind of God” sending ripples over a watery chaos. The Jewish philosopher Martin Buber enlarges this with the image of a mother bird hovering over her nest, “spreading her wings to shelter the totality of the things that are to be”. Not science, of course, rather a poetic symbol of presence and brooding love.

In the story of the Israelites breaking out of slavery in Egypt, it was ruach holding back the Red Sea that made it possible for Moses and his followers to cross safely. When the wind dropped, the sea flooded back and inundated the pharaoh’s army pursuing them. Naturally, the Israelites attributed their deliverance to their God.

Unfortunately, no such wind blew to favour Team N Z on San Francisco Bay. It smiled on Oracle instead.

When former America’s Cup contender Dennis Conner had a similar let-off against Australia II 30 years ago, he commented: “God must be an American.” In San Francisco a New Zealand fan hoped for a judicious puff from “the Man Upstairs”. Bad theology both ways – that’s not what God-talk is all about. Ruach features prominently in another striking word-picture in Israel’s story, that of the valley of dry bones. The prophet Ezekiel drew it to give hope to a dispirited nation. He likens Israel to a valley full of human bones, which at God’s bidding come rattling together and are fleshed out, though still lifeless.

Then ruach breathes life into them, “and they lived, and stood on their feet, a vast multitude”. Unseen wind, the breath of life, the animating spirit (another key meaning for ruach) intertwine to invigorate and inspire.  It’s all over for Team New Zealand this year. But hope springs eternal. Next time, assuming millions of dollars in sponsorship and another generous handout courtesy of currently deflated taxpayers . . . maybe, just maybe.

Or perhaps ruach will blow from a different quarter, breathing into government circles a new spirit where overcoming poverty and its crippling effects on children takes priority over pumping money into another multimillion-dollar yachting extravaganza. Dreams are free . . .

If soldiers truly look into the spiritual dimension, we can abolish war

As murder is condemned in public opinion and in law, so must collective murder be

Paul Oestreicher                  Guardian/UK                     17 November 2011

It calls for a special kind of military courage for a former chief of the general staff to cry out – as Richard Dannatt did (Face to Faith, 12 November) – for a spiritual answer to the good soldier in Afghanistan who has done what he is trained to do and was then impelled to write: "Afterwards I sat there and thought: hang on, I just shot someone … I didn't get to sleep that night … I shot someone." Faced with the good soldier's pain, General Dannatt doubts whether what he calls a "sound moral baseline" is enough – belief in a cause or a leader or even his regiment. It calls, he thinks, for "a spiritual dimension … very much a thing of the heart".

I have spent much of my personal and professional life as a priest, as a church diplomat and as a Quaker, wrestling with that question. Is there a faith-based answer to that private soldier, private in more than one sense? Both my Christian head and my heart tell me that that circle cannot be squared. For too long killing has gone on in some god's name.

"I am the enemy you killed, my friend" is the posthumous cry of the soldier in Wilfred Owen's poem, sung poignantly at the end of Britten's soul-searching War Requiem. Just once in the first world war at Christmas both sides put down their rifles and played a game of football. The common soldiers, British and Germans, knew they had everything in common, but then went on to kill each other. More of such indiscipline would have destroyed military morale. Yet with hindsight, the killing had all been pointless.

I've been privileged to speak of the required spiritual dimension to officers being trained to man our nuclear submarines, those men who, "when the chips are down and the reality of life and death confronts, are reaching out into the spiritual dimension, beyond the rational and beyond the moral". That dimension must hold out the realistic hope of an end to the killing. The outlawing of slavery was not, as most thought, fanciful. Wilberforce achieved it. So it must be with war.

Albert Einstein made that plain long ago. He knew there was no limit to our ability to kill, that the enemy of our survival is war. As murder is condemned in public opinion and in law, so must collective murder be. For the one we go to prison, for the other we get a medal or a hero's funeral.

As our streets are policed, so must our global village be in the future that we hold out to the good soldier's children and theirs. It is a huge task but already in the planning. The Movement for the Abolition of War is not a group of dreamers. It calls for hard heads and brave hearts. It is for generals and privates and the rest of us whose taxes still pay for the killing.

The good soldier is never given a chance to question why, but (with apologies to Kipling) to kill or die. He need not do either, for as the soldier quoted by Richard Dannatt said: "You know … the geezer's another human being." To act on that sentiment is surely the spiritual dimension that the general longs for.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/nov/17/soldiers-spiritual-dimension-abolish-war

The Miracle of the First Nuclear Test Ban

by Ken Butigan              Waging Nonviolence              Ccommon  Dreams                 , Oct. 10, 2013

As we approach the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination next month, we would do well to recall the extraordinary events of the last year of the president’s life. James W. Douglass — in his magisterial 2008 study JFK and the Unspeakable— persuasively argues are significant keys to understanding his death. Douglass’s 12 years of research led him to conclude that the president was killed because he was beginning to shed the armor of the Cold Warrior — at the height of the Cold War — and decided, instead, to become a peacemaker.

In the bipolar geopolitics of the day, Kennedy’s job description committed him to full-on conflict with the Soviet Union. The flash-points included Berlin, Vietnam and Cuba, and most dangerous of all was the accelerating nuclear arms race. How risky it was became clear with the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, when the world came perilously close to a nuclear exchange that could have left hundreds of millions dead.

The seeds of Kennedy’s unlikely move toward peace were sown during this potentially catastrophic incident. Successfully avoiding war in this situation not only meant making an accommodation with his counterpart, Premier Nikita Khrushchev; it meant staring down the forces within his own government, including the Joint Chiefs, that were clamoring for an all-out nuclear attack. This experience seems to have unleashed something in Kennedy. He felt his way toward challenging the ideological framework of his day, leading him to sometimes-secret efforts to make a dramatic shift in policy toward Cuba and the escalating war in Vietnam. Most of all, Kennedy launched a series of initiatives to end the nuclear threat, which, a few months before his death, resulted in the promulgation of the Limited Test Ban Treaty, an historic agreement that prohibited signatories — including the Americans and the Russians — from conducting nuclear tests in the atmosphere and under the oceans.

Fifty years ago today the Partial Test Ban Treaty went into effect. It was the fruit of steps Kennedy took, including his groundbreaking speech at American University earlier that year, which called for a shift in nuclear policy, including a unilateral moratorium in nuclear testing, proffered as an olive branch to the Soviet Union. That summer the barriers to success came down, with the United States and USSR initiating the pact in July. The challenge facing Kennedy was Senate ratification, where there was strong opposition. In August, polling showed 80 percent of the public opposed the treaty. Deciding that “a near miracle was needed,” Kennedy set out to change public opinion, initiating a public awareness campaign, and. succeeded in reversing the public’s attitude in a little over a month. Eighty percent of the country backed the plan, resulting in the Senate approving the treaty 80-19.

Although it would be another quarter of a century before the global Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty would end below-ground nuclear tests, the partial test ban was an historic accomplishment, having far-reaching environmental and political consequences. There is also a treasure trove of lessons for us today, especially about the capacity we have to make headway on seemingly impossible challenges.

The “miracle” Kennedy was seeking was not so otherworldly after all. It began with his own risky steps toward a different world — for which, Douglass’s research convincingly suggests, he paid the ultimate price. Then there were the nitty-gritty mechanics of organizing below the surface of national policy. Even in the doldrums of August, organizers alerted, educated and mobilized the population to catalyze a shift in public opinion — and, in turn, to generate support for peace in the Senate, which was mired in the paralyzing ideology of the Cold War.

There are many times when we are tempted to conclude that we do not have the ability to clamber out of the political quicksand in which we are so often stuck, in a world where we have traded the Cold War for a war on terror. Regimes of worldwide surveillance. Widening gaps in income. The climate crisis. The “us vs. them” world of the early 1960s has splintered into many hemorrhaging challenges.

Yet there is nothing magical or metaphysical about our paralysis — or our liberation. It mostly requires a combination of gumption and plodding work from which the “miracle” of change can flow. This was true half a century ago, and it remains true today.               [Abridged]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/10/10-7

Mass spying: how the US stamps its supremacy on the Pacific region

Antony Loewenstein                          Guardian/UK                9 October 2013

While Washington distracts itself with shutdown shenanigans and failed attempts to control the situation in the Middle East, president Obama’s “pivot to Asia” looks increasingly shaky. Beijing is quietly filling the gap, signing multi-billion dollar trade deals with Indonesia and calling for a regional infrastructure bank.  Meanwhile in recent years, New Zealand has been feeling some of the US's attention, and prime minister John Key is more than happy to shift his country’s traditional skepticism towards Washington into a much friendlier embrace. Canberra is watching approvingly.

 It’s almost impossible to recall a critical comment by leaders of either country towards global US surveillance. We are like obedient school children, scared that the bully won’t like us if we dare argue harder for our own national interests.  The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA), warmly backed by Australian prime minister Tony Abbott and New Zealand, is just the latest example of US client states allowing US multinationals far too much influence in their markets in a futile attempt to challenge ever-increasing Chinese business ties in Asia.

This erosion of sovereignty goes to the heart with what’s wrong with today’s secretive and unaccountable arrangements between nations desperate to remain under the US's security blanket, and New Zealand provides an intriguing case-study in how not to behave, including using US spy services to monitor the phone calls of Kiwi journalist Jon Stephenson and his colleagues while reporting the war in Afghanistan. There’s no indication that Australia isn’t following exactly the same path, with new evidence that Australia knew about the US spying network Prism long before it was made public.    

We still don’t know the exact extent of intelligence sharing between Australia and the US, except it’s very close and guaranteed to continue. New Zealand is a close Australian neighbour, but news from there rarely enters our media. This is a shame because we can learn a lot from the scandal surrounding the illegal monitoring of Dotcom and the public outcry which followed, something missing in Australia after countless post-Snowden stories detailing corporate and government spying on all citizens. 

Dotcom is the founder of Megaupload (today called Mega), a file sharing website that incurred the wrath of US authorities. Washington wanted to punish him but Dotcom obtained New Zealand residency in late 2010, bringing a close US ally into the mix. Intelligence matters usually remain top-secret, leading New Zealand journalist Nicky Hager tells me, but this case was different, blowing open the illegal spying on Dotcom. His lawyers scrutinised all the police warrants after the FBI-requested raid on his house. The government communications security bureau (GCSB) has always claimed it never monitored New Zealand citizens; Dotcom soon discovered this was false. Public outrage followed, and an investigation revealed many other cases of GCSB over-reach since 2003. Prime minister Key responded by changing legislation to allow spying on residents.

Hager explained to me what his investigations uncovered: With Dotcom, GCSB helped the police by monitoring Dotcom's e-mail. What this largely meant in practice was that the GCSB sent a request through to the NSA to do the monitoring for them and received the results back.  The Key government now wants to increase its monitoring capabilities even more, and New Zealanders are showing concern.  N Z journalist Martin Bradbury has also been a vocal critic of the Dotcom case. He’s pushing for a New Zealand digital bill of rights and tells me that “the case against Dotcom is more about the US stamping their supremacy onto the Pacific by expressing US jurisdiction extends not just into New Zealand domestically, but also into cyberspace itself.”    This brings us back to China and the US’s attempts to convince its Pacific friends to fear a belligerent and spying Beijing. The irony isn’t lost on the informed who realise Washington’s global spying network is far more pernicious and widespread than anything the Obama administration and corporate media tell us is coming from the Chinese.

Neither China nor the US are benign in the spying stakes. Both are guilty of aggressively pursuing their interests without informing their citizens of their rights and actions. Australia and NZ are weak players in an increasingly hostile battle between two super-powers, and many other nations in our region are being seduced by the soft power of Beijing (including Papua New Guinea, partly due to its vast resource wealth).  A lack of transparency abounds. What is desperately needed is an adversarial press determined to demand answers about Australia’s intelligence relationship with the US – and whether all citizens should now presume they’re being monitored on a daily basis.

[Abridged]    http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/09/mass-spying-pacific-prism